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Ellen Pao, center, angered many when she dismissed a popular employee. Users shut down message boards in protest. Credit Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley. But sentiment is a fickle thing. Late Friday she fell victim to a crowd demanding her ouster as chief executive of the popular social media site Reddit.

Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists.

The debates over diversity in technology and invective on the Internet have been simmering for a long time, but they’ve boiled over in the last year. One reason is Ms. Pao’s lawsuit against her former employer, the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Her gender discrimination case, years in the making, failed to sway a jury, but did reveal a community that casually tolerated an atmosphere where machismo was prized and women often seemed to be relegated to secondary roles.

Reddit, based in San Francisco, is usually one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, and most visitors are young men. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

The dispute at Reddit, which arose from the dismissal of a well-liked employee earlier this month, drew much of its intensity from Ms. Pao’s lawsuit — and her gender.

“The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” said Sam Altman, a member of the Reddit board. “And that’s just a shame against humanity.”

More than 213,000 people signed a petition demanding Ms. Pao’s resignation. After her departure was announced, Reddit users celebrated in an over-the-top fashion. “Rejoice internet brethren,” wrote one. “The great evil has been slain.”

Ms. Pao wrote in a Reddit post on Friday that in her eight months as chief executive, “I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly.” She added that “the good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity.”

“It was definitely a hard week,” Ms. Pao said in an interview, characterizing her exit as a mutual agreement with the board after having differing views about the company’s future. She began working at Reddit two years ago. Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the Internet, drawing more than 160 million regular monthly visitors.

Mitch Kapor, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that Reddit users were predominantly male and 18 to 29 years old.

“In my view, her job was made more difficult because as a woman, she was particularly subject to the abuse stemming from the pockets of toxic misogyny in the Reddit ecosystem,” said Mr. Kapor, now a partner at Kapor Capital.

Ms. Pao’s departure from Reddit was prompted after the online message board’s tight-knit community broke into upheaval when news broke that Victoria Taylor, a prominent and well-liked Reddit employee, had been suddenly dismissed from the company this month with no public explanation. In protest, Reddit users shut down hundreds of sections of the message board.

Ms. Pao apologized to the site’s members for the episode earlier this week. Reddit’s management made errors, “not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” she said in a post on one of the site’s forums on Monday. “The mods” — moderators — “and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of Reddit.”

The ouster was another setback for Ms. Pao, who rejected a seven-figure settlement offer from Kleiner last fall to end her claims that she had been discriminated against at the venture firm because she was a woman.

Kleiner maintained that Ms. Pao, who joined the firm in 2005 as chief of staff to its best-known partner, John Doerr, was simply not very good as an investor. The case drew attention around the world, in part for its salacious details.

In the wake of the trial, Kleiner said Ms. Pao owed the firm nearly $1 million in court fees but offered to waive the bill if there was no appeal. Ms. Pao countered that the sum was excessive. Judge Harold Kahn agreed and reduced Kleiner’s costs to $276,000. He noted in his ruling that “Ms. Pao has significant economic resources.”

In interviews, Ms. Pao has declined to detail what her next move is, but an appeal in the Kleiner case is quietly moving forward. The court reporter has been ordered to prepare transcripts, which is the next stage of the process. Ms. Pao does not need to give her basis for appeal for many months.

If she eventually succeeds in convincing a three-judge panel that the trial was unfair, Kleiner (and Silicon Valley, symbolically) would be on trial again. Ms. Pao’s lawyers did not return calls for comment on Friday. A lawyer for Kleiner declined to comment.

At Reddit, Ms. Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, the chief technology officer at Hipmunk, a travel search site. Adam Goldstein, chief executive of Hipmunk, said that Mr. Huffman would continue to oversee product and engineering at the site on a part-time basis. Mr. Huffman will also remain on Hipmunk’s board.

Mr. Huffman and Alexis Ohanian started Reddit in a two-bedroom apartment in a Boston suburb a decade ago. Users go to the site to discuss a wide range of topics, including current events and viral memes and gifs. The company, based in San Francisco, has 70 to 80 employees and relies largely upon its thousands of dedicated power users to govern the site.

Reddit is a private company, a majority of which is owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast. Last October, Reddit raised $50 million in venture capital from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Mr. Altman and the rapper Snoop Dogg.

Ms. Pao said she would remain as an adviser to Reddit’s board for the remainder of the year. As for her immediate future, she said, “I plan to get a lot of sleep.”

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Ellen Pao resigned from reddit today by mutual agreement. I'm delighted to announce that Steve Huffman, founder and the original reddit CEO, is returning as CEO.

We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth. She brought a face to reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that.

We’re very happy to have Steve back. Product and community are the two legs of reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does. He has the added bonus of being a founder with ten years of reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of “cofounder”.

A few other points. Mods, you are what makes reddit great. The reddit team, now with Steve, wants to do more for you. You deserve better moderation tools and better communication from the admins.

Second, redditors, you deserve clarity about what the content policy of reddit is going to be. The team will create guidelines to both preserve the integrity of reddit and to maintain reddit as the place where the most open and honest conversations with the entire world can happen.

Third, as a redditor, I’m particularly happy that Steve is so passionate about mobile. I’m very excited to use reddit more on my phone.

As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.

If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.

[1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.

Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.

[2] We were planning to run a CEO search here and talked about how Steve (who we assumed was unavailable) was the benchmark candidate—he has exactly the combination of talent and vision we were looking for. To our delight, it turned out our hypothetical benchmark candidate is the one actually taking the job.

NOTE: I am going to let the reddit team answer questions here, and go do an AMA myself now.

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Ellen Pao, plaintiff in the suit against the prominent venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Many women in technology believe Silicon Valley is stuck in the past. They say they are rarely hired, promoted or taken seriously, and are confronted on a daily basis by sexism and harassment. They feel demeaned and discouraged.

Now, in a suit set to go to trial this week, a jury will pass judgment about whether one woman suffered discrimination. The proceedings could resonate widely: A finding of liability will be seen as a vindication of women’s complaints about the high-tech world; failure of the suit might supply ammunition to those who feel gender issues are being overplayed.

The accuser is Ellen Pao, who worked at one of the valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the center of the suit is John Doerr, a legendary investor who was Ms. Pao’s boss and, according to court papers, practically a father to her. How the man with the Midas touch let his very proud, very image-conscious shop become embroiled in scandal is a question lurking behind the suit.

Ms. Pao says a married colleague pressured her into an affair and then retaliated against her when she broke it off. When she complained, she says she was discriminated against and got poor reviews, resulting ultimately in her dismissal. She accuses Kleiner of treating her “despicably, maliciously, fraudulently and oppressively” from “an improper and evil motive amounting to malice.”

Kleiner fired back last week in a scorched-earth response filed in civil court here, saying the affair was consensual and there was no discrimination. Ms. Pao did not succeed at Kleiner, the firm said, because she “lacked the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player, which is crucial to a successful career as a venture capital senior investing partner.”

No matter whose arguments prevail, the trial promises a rare unscripted peek at Silicon Valley, where every interview tends to be overseen by a publicist. Court papers show it to be a place where colleagues become intimately involved, break up messily, work incessantly and promote themselves remorselessly — a place, in short, like almost everywhere else in America, although perhaps a little more amorous. The couple first had sex “at a work event,” the papers say.

Ms. Pao is seeking as much as $16 million in damages to replace the income she says she never had a chance to make at Kleiner.

Since the suit was filed three years ago, Silicon Valley’s treatment of women has become a major flash point, as nearly every month brings new accusations of men behaving badly. Critics charge that start-up entrepreneurs feel entitled to act like jerks, and that the venture capitalists continue to pour money in because they are afraid of missing the next big thing.

A case in point is Snapchat, the disappearing-message service. Last spring, emails that its chief executive wrote a few years ago to his Stanford fraternity brothers surfaced. They were contemptuous of women to a degree that is unquotable in a newspaper. He apologized after the emails became public.

espiegel@stanford.eduto le-pledgecia095/30/09LUAU FUCKING RAGED.Thanks to all of you.Hope at least six girl sucked your dicks last night. Cuz that didn't happen for me.Thanks again for esverything.Champions.FuckbitchesgetleidSpiegel

[le-pledgecia09] DO NOT TOUCH THE STRIPPER POLE INSIDEEvan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to le-pledgecia096/1/09its going to live in the house for a few days while I try to figure out how to save it.Thanks,Evan

[le-pledgecia09] ACTION NEEDEDEvan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to le-pledgecia099/24/09TO GET PIPHIS FUCKED UPSomebody needs to acquire the following within the next hour:300 small white dixie cups (shot glass size).2 handles of Vitali or another plastic bottle vodka around $12.We need to put the handles in the fridge asap to make the jello shots.The jello should be made and in the fridge by 4pm.If you have any questions, hit me up.Tonight is going to fucking rage.evan

[le-pledgecia09] Last Night and This MorningEvan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to le-pledgecia099/25/09Last Night and This Morning(as depicted by a series of colorful vignettes)by Evan Spiegel9:30 pmFuck, I hope we finish this keg before the PiPhis get here.10:00 pmPiPhis are more frigid than previously anticipated. Maybe if I get more fucked up they will stop huddling in corners.10:30 pmEach team completed one station. Progressive = success. Let's throw a rager.10:35 pmWait, PiPhis don't rage. Bummer. At least we have another tray of rubbing alcohol/jello-flavored shots. Note to self: Thank Coggeshall and Cam.11:00 pmDrunk sex would be a ton of fun right now.11:30 pmI'm definitely too drunk to have sex.Probably too drunk to not have sex. Let's give this a shot.4:00 amDid I just pee on Lily while assuming the big spoon position?4:00:30 amUhoh.4:01 amMaybe I can blame this on her.4:02 amThe back of her skirt is soaked. She's gonna be super irritated. This is pretty gross.4:06 amWalking to PiPhi sucks. Note to self: don't pee on Lily again.4:20 amAt least this bed doesn't have pee on it. Why do girls always have their shit together?8:10 amLate to my first chem section. I need a bike. I wonder if my TA has ever been peed on. She's pretty hot for a TriDelt.8:11 amLet's throw a TriDelt progressive.8:11:15 amDid I really just think that?8:12 amI need to go to sleep.

[le-pledgecia09] because no one reads my list emails anywaysEvan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to le-pledgecia0910/25/09who gives a fuck if i send another oneTHANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR THIS WEEKENDTHE TRAIN TO RAGEDOM DIDN'T STOP FOR ANYTHING/ANYONEour pledge class is currently dominating the fuck out of everythingand if i hear one more freshman tell me how much they love kappa sigma ill probably get soexcited ill punch them in the facethis has happened because we have all been having a fucking blast together.so, give yourself a pat on the back or have some girl put your large kappa sigma dick down her throatbecause you fucking HANDLED this weekendcant wait to see everyone on the blackout express soon,evan

[le-pledgecia09] Fw: More USC details. Read even if you're not in BOOSTabego11/11/09Forwarded MessageTo: kappa-sig <kappa-sig@lists.stanford.edu>Sent: Wed, November 11, 2009 1:06:15 AMSubject: More USC details. Read even if you're not in BOOSTabegoGuys,Here is some more details and stuff to think about for this weekend.- We need a list of people going. Need to prepare popa spiegel. IF YOU DON'T RESPOND BY WEDNESDAY NIGHT, YOU WILL NOT BE LET INTO THE PARTY AND WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO SLEEP THERE (sidenote: Spiegel says if you have hot girl friends in LA they can come over for a little bit for the party let us know they're coming so they get let in).- be responsible at spiegels. Papa Spiegel is liable for underage drinking, he's cool with it but probably not a good idea to take handles to the face. I'm not going to say no shots past 11:30 but just be respectful. We are going to boost on the way down there, but probably not a good idea to show up blacked out on Friday night.- People not coming in the boostabego are still expected to pay for alc if they are going to spiegels and the tailgate- DO NOT USE THE BATHROOM in the boostabego. We have to dump the tanks; don't want to do that.- Reminder - we are drawing straws for drivers. Only fair way to do it.

Kappa Sigma's "National Affairs"Evan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to Kappa2/11/10In case you haven't heard/haven't seen the facebook, we're throwing down a fat party THIS SUNDAY.In honor of Valentine's and President's DayCelebrate the Legacies of our Two-timing Forefathers ...Clinton and LewinskyKennedy and Marilyn... and Sally Hemmings (get some, Jefferson)**Get assassinated in the oval office with a shot to the faceGet high on Air Force OneLaunch nuclear bombs from the Presidential Bunkerand dance at the Inaugural Ball.SUID to run for office

Evan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to Kappa6/9/10that's right.NOW: drinking9:30 PM pledges arrive to set up (make them do whatever you want/need)11:00 PM stanford friends are blacked the fuck out with usshopping list:3 kegs5 plasticsplastic shot glasses- 1 ounce of marijuana- 1 kilo of blowim gonna have some pledges make jello shotsill roll a blunt for whoever sees the most tits tonightevanPulse Update: Bobby is really high now.

So it appears SAE and TDX are releasing their Fall Collection of Whack Tanks for Sororisluts...Evan Thomas Spiegel <espiegel@stanford.edu>to Kappa10/13/10and considering we've already paid for these bad boys...I don't see why we shouldn't get this order in ASAP.EMAIL ME IF YOU OBJECT.EvanKappa SigmaBeta ZetaAEKDB

A few months later, Snapchat raised a new investment round valuing it at $10 billion. Among those supplying cash was Kleiner Perkins.

There is an uproar over a lack of diversity in tech, highlighted most recently by Jesse L. Jackson Sr. and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s campaign for more inclusiveness. But the clubby world of venture funding remains almost exclusively male.

The total number of female partners at venture capital firms has declined to 6 percent from 10 percent in 1999, according to a report last fall from the Diana Project, a research effort on female entrepreneurs. Fortune magazine, analyzing slightly different data, found the number of female V.C.s increased in 2014 by exactly one.

“Silicon Valley is far from perfect at living up to our ideals,” said David A. Bell, a partner at the Fenwick & West law firm who has been measuring gender diversity in the valley for a decade. “It is clear that women are underrepresented at all levels.”

Kleiner contends that Ms. Pao’s suit is not only wrong in its specifics but also that the firm is being unfairly maligned. It says that over 20 percent of its partners are women, and that it backs start-ups run by women at four times the rate of the rest of the industry.

“We look forward to clearing our name in court,” said Christina Lee, a Kleiner spokeswoman.

Ms. Pao did not respond to a request for comment left with her lawyer, Alan B. Exelrod.

Her original complaint, filed in May 2012, has already become part of Silicon Valley lore. It said that a Kleiner partner did not invite her or any other women to an important dinner because “women kill the buzz”; that another Kleiner partner inappropriately gave her Leonard Cohen’s sex-drenched “Book of Longing”; and that this same partner told her “the personalities of women” did not lead to success at Kleiner “because women are quiet.”

A Princeton-trained engineer and Harvard-trained lawyer who has deep experience in the technology field, Ms. Pao first came under media scrutiny when she married Alphonse Fletcher Jr. in 2007, after her affair with the colleague, Ajit Nazre, ended. Mr. Fletcher, a financier, has a history of both suing and being sued. His hedge fund is bankrupt and pension funds are suing to recover their investments amid accusations of fraud.

Mr. Fletcher’s reversals appear in Kleiner’s trial brief, presumably to imply that the couple has serious financial needs and that might be the underlying reason for her suit. The brief reprints the text messages from the breakup of her affair (“I can’t believe I was so wrong about you”), cites her lackluster evaluations (“not sure I really trust her motivations”) and dismisses her claims:

“Pao’s complaints that she did not sit in the front row at a meeting, was not sitting at a table during an event, her office was not in ‘the power corridor’ (whatever that means), she was not included on someone’s interview schedule, she was asked to take notes during a meeting — among many, many others — are simply not even close to being adverse employment actions sufficient to constitute retaliation.”

Some things are not intended for public consumption, however. In another filing, Kleiner’s lawyers said how it managed its investment funds was a trade secret, and asked that the courtroom be closed during any discussion of the details.

Ms. Pao is interim chief executive of Reddit, the news commentary website, which has also been drawn into the case. An anonymous Reddit employee sent a letter to Kleiner’s legal team, asking them to subpoena Reddit employees “for information regarding conflicts with Ellen Pao.” Such information could support the defense’s contention that the person really undermining Ms. Pao at Kleiner was Ms. Pao.

The danger in a no-holds-barred approach, of course, is that it also serves to tarnish Kleiner, which in its dot-com glory days used discretion to help perpetuate its mystique. Kleiner made fortunes in Netscape, Genentech, Amazon and Google, but has not had a huge name-brand hit recently.

Women might not kill the buzz, as Ms. Pao says she was told, but messy court cases sure do.

“It is very rare that an individual discrimination case reaches a jury, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere,” said Melinda S. Riechert, a high-tech employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “Most cases settle.”

That does not seem likely to happen here. At a hearing this month, Lynne C. Hermle, a lawyer for Kleiner, said a mediation attempt accomplished little.

“To say it was unproductive would be an understatement,” Ms. Hermle said.

Correction: February 24, 2015

An article on Monday about a pending sex discrimination suit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers described the potential outcome of the case incorrectly. The jury will determine civil liability; it cannot deliver a “guilty verdict.”

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After a year of talk about the lack of female venture capitalists, not much has changed.

One year ago, Fortune published research showing that just 4.2% of decision-makers at venture capital firms were female. It was a distressing finding, although not terribly surprising to anyone who has spent time in the industry’s khaki-covered corridors.

This week we decided to update and expand on our data, in order to see how things have, or haven’t, changed. The past 12 months has seen a lot of hand-wringing over the dearth of female investors, including by Newsweek in its controversial new cover story on sexism in Silicon Valley. But did any of it have an impact?

In short, no.

Last year’s report focused on “decision-makers” at U.S.-based venture capital firms that had raised at least one fund of $200 million or more, dating back to 2009. We basically researched the number of female senior partners at each firm (primarily utilizing firm websites and SEC filings) or, when the terminology differed, the most senior “layer” of investment professionals (sometimes that was “general partner” or “managing partner” or “partner,” etc.). It found 542 such decision-makers, but only 23 of them were female (4.2%).

That exact same sample of VC firms currently has 546 decision-makers, of which 24 are female. In other words, these 92 firms — which managed over $60 billion — had added only one female senior partner in the past year, despite all of the media attention (read: shaming) and discussion at industry conferences.

However, we wanted to get a broader understanding of the landscape. So we asked data provider Pitchbook to send us a list of every U.S. VC firm that has raised a fund of $100 million or more since 2009. This expanded our universe to 191 firms that had raised around $114 billion for 305 funds during the time period.

Within this broader group (inclusive of the original cohort), we found that 5.6% of decision-makers were women. In other words, women have slightly better representation in the upper echelons of smaller funds, than in larger ones.

We also looked at the overall number of female investment professionals within the larger group, no matter their level of seniority. The result here was that nearly 10% of all investment professionals (168 of 1,687) were women.

Pitchbook also sent over its own research, which took a broader view of “decision-maker.” It also finds that firms raising smaller funds are more likely to have senior female partners than are firms that raise larger funds, and also finds a small bump in senior female partners at newer firms than at firms founded prior to 2009.

Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of a Man’s World of TechBy DAVID STREITFELDJUNE 2, 2012

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MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.

But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?

That’s the debate that has sprung up here since Ellen Pao, a junior partner in her early 40s at the distinguished venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the company and her colleagues there.

The complaint, laced with accusations of professional retaliation after spurned sexual advances, has riveted Silicon Valley, whose venture capitalists generally prefer media attention for their businesses and deals, not themselves. Instead of talking about the New New Thing, people are discussing an old, old problem. And they are taking sides.

Although the accusations have yet to be heard in court, even some of Ms. Pao’s critics concede that she is exposing an uncomfortable truth about Silicon Valley: starting tech companies in 2012 is still a male game, and so is funding them.

Ellen Pao, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has filed a lawsuit contending sexual harassment. The suit has surprised some people in Silicon Valley because Kleiner Perkins is among relatively few such firms there to routinely hire and promote women. Credit Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Her complaint goes further. It depicts venture capitalists here as a group of 21st-century men who may be hard at work building the 22nd century but, when it comes to dealing with women in the workplace, are stuck firmly in the caveman era — or at least in the 1950s. It’s a portrait that many women in tech find all too familiar.

“You talk to any woman in technology and she will have a personal story or know a story where she felt conscious of her gender in subtle or significant ways,” said Kathy Savitt, 48, the chief executive of the social commerce start-up Lockerz. Sometimes, she said, it’s as mild as realizing, “I’m the only chick in the room.” Other times, “it’s a lack of relevance, a feeling you can see an end to your opportunities.”

With the number of women in Silicon Valley so meager, a prominent discrimination lawsuit does not surprise Ms. Savitt. This place runs into trouble with women on a regular basis, most memorably in recent years when the C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard resigned after inappropriate conduct with a former reality TV actress who was working for him.

Still, Ms. Pao’s lawsuit has injected talk of sexual politics into a conversation that generally sticks to money and eyeballs and business plans, monetization and enlightenment of the masses. Men in Silicon Valley may not behave any worse than men anywhere else, but people here like to think it’s all a meritocracy.

The shock really stems from where the scandal is taking place. Ms. Savitt knows Kleiner well; the firm is financing Lockerz. She cannot comment on the suit but expresses her deep admiration for the Kleiner crew. The firm is one of the few exceptions to the venture world’s disinterest in hiring women. A quarter of its 50 partners are female.

That fact fits awkwardly with the lawsuit’s claim that one male executive, Randy Komisar, told Ms. Pao that women would never succeed at Kleiner “because women are quiet.” Another male executive, Chi-Hua Chien, is quoted in the suit saying women were not being invited to a big-deal dinner because they would “kill the buzz.”

Neither Ms. Pao nor any of the parties mentioned in the lawsuit would comment on it.

Kleiner is an unlikely defendant for another reason. It is particularly conscious of its image. “As Kleiner Perkins sees it, the Florence of the Renaissance had the Medicis, the American steel industry had the House of Morgan, and Silicon Valley in the late 20th century has Kleiner Perkins,” David A. Kaplan wrote in “The Silicon Boys” in 1999.

That was when the firm was at its peak, the money behind Netscape, Genentech, Amazon and a little start-up called Google.

“If you believe every allegation in the complaint, it’s appalling and an important window into how the valley works,” Mr. Kaplan said. “But I’m somewhat skeptical. The clichés you hear in the valley are about the pranks, the obsessiveness, the Foosball tables. You don’t really hear about randiness and mistreatment of women. That doesn’t prove it’s not there, but that’s not the lore.”

Of course, it depends on your perspective. Sandy Kurtzig was one of two female engineering students in her class at Stanford in the late 1960s and is still in the game, with a start-up funded by Kleiner. She always tried to take the valley’s sexism in stride — “When men made passes, I just downplayed it so the guy doesn’t feel he’s being put down when rejected” — but is disappointed by its persistence.

“I am shocked there aren’t more women in high positions in Silicon Valley,” Ms. Kurtzig said. “I always thought the world was going to be gender-blind.”

KLEINER’S headquarters in an office park near here does everything possible to minimize the moment. A low-slung building that is obscured if not overwhelmed by vegetation, it looks like the home of a laid-back research center for the promotion of world peace. The parking lot has one Porsche, but otherwise Lexus is about as fancy as it gets. Venture capital wants to change the world without drawing attention to itself.

While Kleiner has seen its magic touch somewhat dimmed of late — it came very late to the money fountain that was Facebook — a lawsuit like this could permanently kill the buzz. Already, it has eclipsed the mid-May announcement of the firm’s 15th fund, a $525 million investment pot. Which, despite all those women at Kleiner, is being run by one woman and nine men.

Ms. Pao, who came to Kleiner with the dream of helping direct such a fund, graduated from Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering. She got a law degree from Harvard and worked for Cravath Swaine & Moore for two years doing international deals. She returned to Harvard for a business degree and worked for a variety of tech companies, including BEA Systems and Tellme Networks. Her geek cred is pretty unassailable.

In 2005, she came to Kleiner as a junior partner, working as chief of staff to John Doerr. He was one of the main evangelists who shaped the modern Internet, a geek’s geek who became a billionaire. But, unlike many here, money never seemed his primary goal.

Ms. Pao with John Doerr, who was her boss when she said a fellow junior partner began harassing her. Mr. Doerr recently wrote that Kleiner Perkins would “vigorously defend our reputation.” Credit Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Ms. Pao’s role was to help Mr. Doerr identify investments, interview executives and write speeches.

According to the suit, her troubles began almost immediately when another junior partner, Ajit Nazre, made inappropriate sexual advances. Eventually, the complaint says, Ms. Pao “succumbed to Mr. Nazre’s insistence on sexual relations on two or three occasions.” When she put an end to the relationship, it says, he “started a consistent pattern of retaliation against her.” This went on for five years, it contends.

The harassment part of the suit pales in comparison to the retaliation part, which blends into an allegation of a general effort to keep women in their place. Kleiner, Ms. Pao’s lawsuit says, discriminated against her and other women “by failing to promote them comparably to men, by compensating them less than men through lower salary, bonus and carried interest, by restricting the number of investments that women are allowed to make as compared to men.”

The firm, which has about 80 employees here with a handful more in China, is accused of failing to act when complaints of sexual harassment or discrimination were made. Ms. Pao says women are excluded from meetings and discussions. The firm fails to provide opportunities for visibility and success inside and outside the firm for women as compared with men, the complaint says.

Kleiner supporters have some questions, even if they do not necessarily wish to go on the record: Why did a talented woman stay for so long at a place that was treating her so poorly? Also, how is it that you can’t remember how many times you slept with someone who harassed you?

And how is it possible that Mr. Doerr never listened to her assertions of retaliation and discrimination? Mr. Doerr declined to comment, but his supporters have an answer. The first that anyone at the firm knew of her concerns, they say, was just five months ago — at which point Kleiner promptly brought in a lawyer to investigate. He found no basis to her complaints, the firm says.

If you take the Kleiner line, Mr. Nazre was less the instigator than the victim; he had a consensual affair with Ms. Pao and now is being portrayed as a harasser. The suit says he left the firm after the investigator’s report at the beginning of the year, implying a cause and effect. People inside Kleiner say he left of his own volition before the inquiry began.

Mr. Nazre has not surfaced since the lawsuit was filed. A voice-mail message box belonging to him was full late last week. He did not answer messages through his LinkedIn page, which says he still works at Kleiner.

Kleiner supporters said that the firm made repeated efforts to achieve a resolution, but that the parties could not come to terms. The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco Superior Court on May 10, but was not reported in the news media until two weeks later.

BOTH sides in the case are bringing out high-profile legal firepower. Ms. Pao is represented by the employment law specialist Alan B. Exelrod, who won a significant victory against the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in a harassment case. Kleiner is represented by Lynne C. Hermle, an equally celebrated employer defense lawyer. Ms. Hermle successfully defended I.B.M. in a case in which an employee said she was fired after complaining about sexual harassment.

Ms. Hermle has until June 13 to file a response to the accusations. “The complaint has no merit whatsoever,” she said. Mr. Exelrod declined to comment.

Ms. Pao is known to the small world of venture capitalists here. Her husband, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., whom she married after the physical relationship with Mr. Nazre ended, is not. But he is well known in New York and has become the object of considerable fascination in the tech world.

Mr. Fletcher, known as Buddy, has recently been in the news for suing the Dakota, the apartment building on Central Park West, for not letting him buy a fifth unit. Mr. Fletcher, a former president of the Dakota board, said he needed the new rooms, which adjoin his main apartment, to accommodate his growing family that includes not only Ms. Pao but also their young daughter.

Mr. Fletcher, who is black, is accusing the Dakota of racial discrimination and defamation. The Dakota responded to the suit by saying its concerns were not racial but financial: it did not think that Mr. Fletcher could afford another apartment.

An account of the suit in The New York Times noted that in 2003 and 2006, workmen on Mr. Fletcher’s Connecticut estate had accused him of sexual harassment. Mr. Fletcher denied the allegations, which were settled out of court. He declined to respond to a request for comment.

Before the marriage, Mr. Fletcher had lived at the Dakota with his longtime boyfriend, Hobart V. Fowlkes Jr.

Ms. Pao’s husband, Alphonse Fletcher Jr., who is suing the board of the Dakota, where they live, contending defamation and racial discrimination. Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“I must admit that I do not know Ellen as intimately as I obviously know Buddy,” Mr. Fowlkes wrote in an e-mail. “However, my interactions with Ellen have never been anything but positive.”

He added that he was “extremely touched” that they asked him to be the godfather of their daughter, “given the circumstances.”

FORGET about the Facebook I.P.O. For some entrepreneurial women, Ms. Pao’s lawsuit was the more significant event of the last month.

“When the news broke, we stopped what we were doing and were, like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Claire Mazur, a founder of Of a Kind, an e-commerce start-up based in New York.

Ms. Mazur said she never had a problem getting meetings with venture capitalists. “But it’s definitely harder to talk to male investors who don’t have as much experience with retail and fashion,” she said. “That kind of personal connection can be key to getting funding.”

Or, as another e-commerce entrepreneur put it, “You’re trying to explain to a man why shopping is fun.”

Speaking only on the condition of anonymity — you never can tell whom you’re going to be asking for money — some entrepreneurs are more despairing.

One woman said she interviewed at a top venture firm in 2000 after coming out of business school. “I was told point-blank that they once had a woman and it didn’t work out,” she said. “That was 12 years ago and they haven’t had a single woman partner since.”

Kleiner, whatever its problems, actually hired women. So this executive worries that the message of the case to others will be: We were right to stick with the guys. She said she just got off the phone with a venture-backed chief executive who found out she was pregnant. The board was already moving to dump her.

The cold stats: Women make up just 9.1 percent of the board members of Silicon Valley companies, compared with 16 percent of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies, according to Spencer Stuart, the headhunting firm. The National Venture Capital Association estimates, based on a recent survey, that only about 11 percent of investing partners at venture firms are women.

The ratio is not much higher for the entrepreneurs these firms back. In 2009, only 11 percent of companies that received venture backing had a female C.E.O. or founder, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.

IT’S a retro state of affairs, although that isn’t stopping Silicon Valley from protecting its own, which means Kleiner. One Kleiner-backed woman said in an interview that she didn’t think much of Ms. Pao’s suit. “Anybody can sue anybody for anything, right?” Then she called back and said that she had now read the blogs and news articles about it, that the whole thing was a mess, that she was speaking out of ignorance and could she just stay out of it?

Few lawsuits like this make it to a jury, but Ms. Pao’s case might be an exception. And some on both sides want the case to go to trial. Any settlement by Kleiner could look like an acknowledgment of guilt. The firm, meanwhile, is playing as aggressive a defense as it dares, given the legal constraints.

Owen Thomas, a former Valleywag gossip columnist and a longtime Silicon Valley observer, saw the situation this way: “If a tenth of this is true, Kleiner Perkins has a problem.”

The women of the firm are certainly not united behind Ms. Pao. One of them, Beth Seidenberg, a general partner, took the unusual step of issuing a statement.

“I was drawn to the firm because of its diversity and have excelled here as have other women,” she said. “Everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed” at Kleiner. In an interview, she repeated those points.

Last week, Mr. Doerr posted a lengthy message on the firm’s Web site, saying Kleiner Perkins would “vigorously defend our reputation.” He did not mention his former aide by name. The next day, Kleiner announced that it was hiring a new female partner.

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The hedge fund of Alphonse Fletcher Jr. has been described by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee as having elements of a Ponzi scheme.Credit Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Sitting around a table in Baton Rouge, La., in February 2008, a handful of board members of the Firefighters’ Retirement System of Louisiana heard an investment pitch that would later come back to haunt them.

Their consultant, Joe Meals, said that others had already jumped at the chance to invest with Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a flashy Wall Street financier whom Mr. Meals described as a long-established hedge fund manager, according to video recordings. The fund was offering essentially a 12 percent guaranteed return, according to Mr. Meals, secured by a third-party investor, and the opportunity was so hot the board would have to make a decision that day.

“I can tell you, it won’t be on the table this time next month,” Mr. Meals told the group, according to the video recordings. “It won’t take 30 days for somebody else to want it.”

The firefighters’ system eventually said yes, and along with two other pension funds — the Municipal Employees’ Retirement System and the New Orleans Firefighters’ Pension and Relief Fund — invested a combined $100 million in one of Mr. Fletcher’s funds, FIA Leveraged. As they understood it, the fund would invest in liquid securities that could be sold in a matter of weeks.

The details sounded, as one board member put it, “too good to be true.”

In fact, they were.

Mr. Fletcher’s hedge fund has since been described by a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee as having elements of a Ponzi scheme, and four retirement systems are fighting to recover their money. A federal judge is scheduled to rule in March on a plan to liquidate the fund’s assets, which the trustee deemed “virtually worthless” in a report last November.

The pension funds, which handle the retirement benefits for thousands of public employees in Louisiana, can only hope to get their money back through various civil lawsuits, the most recent of which was filed in the middle of January.

The mere mention of the word Ponzi these days summons the specter of Bernard L. Madoff, but Mr. Fletcher insists that is not the case here. “I have never supervised anything even remotely resembling a Ponzi. I am not the black Madoff,” Mr. Fletcher, who is African-American, said in a related bankruptcy proceeding last year.

The trustee, Richard Davis, who was appointed in 2012 after Mr. Fletcher’s main fund, Fletcher International, filed for bankruptcy protection, concurs in part. “In Madoff, it was an easy lesson,” he said in an interview. “It’s a little more complex here.”

Millions of dollars have been lost, that much is certain. The explanation of how that happened and who is responsible is still emerging, but the cast, in addition to Mr. Fletcher, includes “those we normally think of as creating a line of protection against such fraud,” as Mr. Davis put it in his report. Named in various lawsuits are the consultant, Mr. Meals; the administrator of the hedge fund, Citco; and its auditor, Grant Thornton, which resigned as auditor after overstating a related fund’s value by $80 million, according to court documents.

Mr. Fletcher, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article, recently described the bankruptcy estate’s assets as “valuable,” according to court filings, and he has disputed many of the accusations made by the retirement systems and the trustee. Warren J. Martin Jr. of the law firm Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, who is representing one of Mr. Fletcher’s entities in a related bankruptcy, declined to comment.

Mr. Fletcher, who is known as Buddy, is no stranger to litigation, and the action by the Louisiana pension funds is just the latest twist in a dramatic personal narrative.

A former Wall Street whiz kid, Mr. Fletcher once produced larger-than-life profits that earned him national media attention. Magazine profiles trumpeted the reported 350 percent returns of his firm, Fletcher Asset Management. A representative from the firm told the Firefighters’ Retirement System that one Fletcher fund had not had a losing month in over a decade.

A graduate of Harvard, Mr. Fletcher worked at Bear Stearns and then Kidder, Peabody & Company before starting his own fund in the early 1990s. While at Kidder, Mr. Fletcher, then in his 20s, managed a portfolio that reported $25 million in profit. When the firm did not pay him his expected bonus, he sued, claiming discrimination.

An arbitration panel eventually awarded Mr. Fletcher $1.3 million but ruled that Kidder had not discriminated against him.

In 2012, Granville Bowie, Kidder’s human resources manager during the time Mr. Fletcher was there, told Boston Magazine that the firm declined to pay the bonus because Mr. Fletcher had refused to tell anyone how he was generating his profits.

After he left Kidder, Mr. Fletcher returned to Bear Stearns, and later started Fletcher Asset Management. Things appeared to take off, and he became known as much for how he displayed his wealth as how he made it.

He bought four units in the Dakota, the Manhattan apartment building known for housing artistic icons including John Lennon, Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland. He pledged millions to charity.

But things at the Dakota turned sour in 2011, when Mr. Fletcher sued the building and accused it of discrimination, contending that the board declined to sell him a fifth apartment because he is black. The case attracted national media attention, and in some ways signaled the beginning of his firm’s downfall.

News reports widely quoted the board’s response, that it was his fund’s “apparent lack of profitability” that swayed its decision. The board denied it was discriminatory, and the case is still pending.

Weeks later, the Firefighters’ Retirement System tried to withdraw $17 million of its investment. Another pension fund made a similar request, according to a joint announcement all three pension systems that invested in FIA Leveraged made in July 2011 after a report in The Wall Street Journal raised questions about the investment.

Believing they were entitled to cash redemptions within a matter of weeks, the pension funds were dismayed to receive i.o.u.s due in two years. Over the next few months, more reports began to surface that questioned the soundness of Mr. Fletcher’s investments.

The Louisiana pension systems hired auditors to look over the books, and the S.E.C., the F.B.I. and the Louisiana inspector general’s office opened investigations. The S.E.C. and the F.B.I. declined to comment, but people briefed on the cases say they are continuing. Greg Phares, the administrative program director at the inspector general’s office, confirmed that the agency is continuing to work with other groups that are investigating the Fletcher case, but declined to comment further.

The pension funds now say that FIA Leveraged brought in no new investors after them, an allegation that the trustee’s report appears to back up.

“In many ways, the fraud here has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, where, absent new investor money coming in, the overall structure would collapse due to an inability to meet existing redemption and other obligations,” the report says.

When the pension money ran out, the trustee said, “the scheme was sustained for a time by continued use of inflated valuations,” resulting in a “serious loss” for the pension funds and other creditors.

“There’s a lot of things I wasn’t aware of until I read the trustee’s report,” said Robert L. Rust, the executive director of the municipal pension fund. “Like where the money went.”

According to the trustee’s report, $8 million went toward “Violet and Daisy,” a film produced by Mr. Fletcher’s brother, the screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher. Money from FIA Leveraged was used to buy a $27 million fund-of-funds business from Citco, the fund’s administrator, which the retirement systems contend was an inappropriate use of their investment.

In his report, Mr. Davis said that Mr. Fletcher’s main fund was most likely insolvent as of 2008 and that it had not made a single profitable trade since before the Louisiana pension funds even decided to invest.

Further, Mr. Davis revealed that Mr. Meals’s advisory firm, the Consulting Services Group, received a fee from Citco for pitching the Fletcher investment, something the pension funds say they did not know at the time. Mr. Meals, who no longer works for the firm and said he was self-employed, said the payment was returned to the retirement systems, something that Steven Stockstill, the director and legal counsel for the firefighters fund, disputes.

In the recordings, Mr. Meals is heard telling the firefighters fund that its money would be secured by $50 million from a third-party investor. If the cash returns dipped below 12 percent, that $50 million would make up the difference. As a trade-off, the pension funds agreed to forgo any return above 18 percent.

Mr. Davis highlighted the promise of guaranteed returns and the claim that one of Mr. Fletcher’s funds had no down months from June 1997 through December 2007, a period that included market-shaking events like the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the Russian debt crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

“These red flags should have caused the administrators and auditors to have investigated, disclosed and stopped,” the trustee stated in his report. “None did.”

Citco declined to comment.

In January, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Retirement Fund, which invested $25 million with another fund of Mr. Fletcher’s that is also in bankruptcy, filed its own suit against Grant Thornton in Massachusetts Superior Court, contending that the company “failed to properly audit and value the holdings of a reportedly corrupt hedge fund manager.”

Representatives for the Massachusetts fund declined to comment. In an email, a spokeswoman for Grant Thornton said: “We are confident that our work complied with all professional standards and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves.”

The Louisiana retirement funds say that the Fletcher investment stung but was not catastrophic. “The system is financially strong and none of our retirees or our members are in any jeopardy because of the diversification of the portfolio,” Mr. Rust said. “But we have a responsibility to go after the people who took the money.”

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Ellen Pao, center, now interim chief of the social media news site Reddit, outside of the courthouse on Friday. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — One of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capital firms prevailed on Friday over a former partner in a closely watched suit claiming gender discrimination, but hardly got away unscathed.

The plaintiff, Ellen Pao, had accused the firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, of discriminating against her in the course of her employment and eventual dismissal.

The decision handed Kleiner a sweeping victory in a case that had mesmerized Silicon Valley with its salacious details while simultaneously amplifying concerns about the lack of diversity in the technology industry.

Even with her loss in the case, Ms. Pao’s suit succeeded in prompting debate about women in technology and venture capital, said Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University.

“This case sends a powerful signal to Silicon Valley in general and the venture capital industry in particular,” Ms. Rhode said. “Defendants who win in court sometimes lose in the world outside it.”

Kleiner and its lawyers did little to celebrate the win, with the lawyer Lynne C. Hermle saying that it “never occurred to me for a second that a careful and attentive jury like this would find either discrimination or retaliation.” Kleiner issued a statement saying it was committed to supporting women.

Ellen Pao spoke to the news media after a jury rejected her claims of gender discrimination on Friday. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Pao waved to the jury as she left the courtroom for the last time, a smile fixed on her face. “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she said in a brief news conference.

Her suit, filed in Superior Court here, claimed that Kleiner did not promote her because of her gender, that it retaliated against her for complaining, that it failed to prevent gender discrimination and that it fired her in 2012 for complaining.

The suit asked $16 million in compensatory damages plus punitive damages. Ms. Pao is now interim chief of the social media news site Reddit.

After the jurors rejected each of her four claims, they were found to be one vote short on a claim about her termination. For two hours, doubt reigned, the media unspooled possible outcomes and the jury went back to work. In the end, the problem seemed more juror confusion than anything else, and the claim went down with the others.

The jurors said in interviews they did not take on the role of “conscience of this community,” as one of Ms. Pao’s lawyers had urged in the closing arguments. They focused on the facts at hand, and concluded it was Ms. Pao’s own performance that held her back.

One juror, Steve Sammut, 62, said it was difficult coming to a verdict.

“We were split there for a while,” he said, adding that a key point was how Ms. Pao’s reviews at Kleiner deteriorated over time. He also said the witnesses for Kleiner, most of whom came from the firm, helped seal the case.

Another juror, Marshalette Ramsey, 41, said she believed Ms. Pao was discriminated against. The male junior partners at Kleiner “had those same character flaws that Ellen was cited with,” but they were promoted, she said.

“I’m going home emotional,” said Ms. Ramsey.

Ms. Pao joined Kleiner in 2005 as chief of staff to John Doerr, the firm’s best-known partner. She became a junior investing partner, failed to make senior partner and was fired in 2012.

It was the most prominent trial in Silicon Valley in memory for many reasons, including Kleiner Perkins’s reputation as the quintessential venture capital firm. But the suit, filed in 2012, also came as the freewheeling ways of the male-dominated technology industry increasingly drew scrutiny.

Episodes of men behaving badly make the news frequently here, whether it is sexism or harassment in the workplace or just derogatory attitudes toward women. Critics are increasingly drawing a straight line between such behavior and the small percentage of women who are engineers and executives, and the even smaller percentage of women who are venture capitalists.

According to research from Babson College, the percentage of female venture capitalists is 6 percent, down from 10 percent at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999.

The suit and the trial introduced a number of colorful phrases that were said to have been uttered to or about Ms. Pao. Most were heavily disputed by the defense, but they made it appear that Kleiner has been slow to evolve since it was formed in the early 1970s.

“Kleiner Perkins has been significantly tainted by the facts that have come out in this proceedings,” Ms. Rhode of Stanford said.

During the trial, numerous details emerged, including Mr. Doerr’s telling an investigator that Ms. Pao had a “female chip on her shoulder.” Chi-Hua Chien, a partner, said women should not be invited to a dinner with former Vice President Al Gore because they “kill the buzz.” A senior partner at the time, Ray Lane, joked to a junior partner that she should be “flattered” that a colleague showed up at her hotel room door wearing only a bathrobe. Another senior partner, Ted Schlein, seemed never to have heard of the exhortation of Sheryl Sandberg, a senior Facebook executive, that women should “sit at the table,” testifying, “I really don’t think it was a very big deal to us who sits at a table or who does not.”

John Doerr, right, a Kleiner Perkins partner, outside of court earlier this month. During testimony, Mr. Doerr agreed that the percentage of female venture capitalists was “pathetic,” though he came across as an ambivalent figure during his hours on the stand. Credit Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Ms. Pao is married to Alphonse Fletcher Jr., a Wall Street financier whose hedge fund is bankrupt. Pension funds are suing to recover their money amid accusations of fraud. Kleiner tried to insert Mr. Fletcher into the case, which would have raised questions about Ms. Pao’s motives in bringing suit, but Judge Kahn refused to allow it.

Mr. Fletcher did not attend the trial.

In a sign that the struggle over the place of women in Silicon Valley is only beginning, gender discrimination suits have recently been filed against two prominent companies, Facebook and Twitter.

The suit against Twitter, by a former engineer, Tina Huang, claims that the process for promotion is not clear and is biased in favor of men, a claim that Ms. Pao also made about Kleiner. The suit seeks class-action status. Twitter said in a statement that it was committed “to a diverse and supportive workplace.”

The suit against Facebook is narrower. Chia Hong, a former manager, says she was “discriminated against, harassed, and retaliated against” because of her sex and race, culminating in her termination. Ms. Hong is represented by Lawless & Lawless, one of the firms representing Ms. Pao. Facebook has said that it works “extremely hard” on diversity and believes that it treated the employee in question fairly.

The Kleiner trial, which took 24 days before it went to the jury on Wednesday, offered a glimpse of the Silicon Valley elite at work and play.

Ms. Pao accidentally learned about the dinner Mr. Gore was having because she was living in the same San Francisco building. She met Mr. Fletcher at an exclusive fellowship that Mr. Doerr recommended her for. Even after being fired by Kleiner in 2012, Ms. Pao was paid $33,333 a month for the next six months, plus benefits and bonus. Most Americans could never imagine such handsome remuneration, terminated or not.

But it was competitive and even combative, with sharp elbows and tears. Ms. Pao, it emerged in testimony, compiled a “resentment” chart of colleagues who, she believed, wronged her. People worked through holidays and maternity leaves. The pressure to discover the newest new thing was immense. One great investment — a Google, a Facebook, an Amazon — could make your reputation for life.

As for the rest of life, there was not much of it for the junior partners. One of the stranger points brought up in testimony was how Ms. Pao, before she was married, had dated a colleague for six months without ever realizing he was still living with his wife.

Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving 'sickening' abuse from usersbu Martin Pengelly in New York and Kevin Rawlinson10 July 2015

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‘I’m just another human,’ says outgoing boss, who was forced to quit by users angry about alleged attempts to curb the site’s ‘anything goes’ tone

In an April interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo News, Ellen Pao says women are often undermined in the workplace in countless small ways.

Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, has resigned following a user backlash against the sacking of one of the company’s employees.

Pao, who became an international symbol for gender imbalance in Silicon Valley when she lost a landmark discrimination lawsuit, leaves after around eight months in the job and will be replaced by the site’s co-founder Steve Huffman.

Last week she apologised for letting down users after Reddit sacked its director of talent, Victoria Taylor, who was responsible for the site’s Ask Me Anything forums. Taylor’s dismissal led to a petition from users demanding Pao’s removal that attracted more than 210,000 signatures. It also led to Pao reportedly receiving death threats from users angry at her handling of the situation.

Reddit made the announcement in a statement on Friday afternoon saying it was by “mutual agreement”, even as Pao signalled “a different view” from the board.

But, in a bid to take the sting out of any acrimony, both Reddit’s board member Sam Altman and Pao wrote pleas for compassion after the harassment.

Pao urged those users who attacked her to remember that she was “just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings”. In a resignation statement, she wrote that she has seen “the good, the bad and the ugly on Reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity”.

She wrote: “Everyone attacked on Reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said.”

Altman said that it was “sickening to see some of the things” that the site’s users had written about Pao.

He wrote: “The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is internet between you.”

“If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.”

Disagreements, he said, were not a problem. But, in an apparent reference to messages sent to Pao, he wrote that death threats would not be tolerated and that users who sent them would be banned.

Pao’s relationship with Reddit’s users deteriorated when the site, which was known for its “anything goes” atmosphere, began an anti-harassment drive in May this year.

It caused further anger when that led to the shutting down of a handful of sections that “allow their communities to use [them] as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action”.

Reddit’s management was accused by some of seeking to limit free speech, although the site’s bosses insisted they were “banning behaviour, not ideas”.

Relations soured further with the dismissal of Taylor. Many of the unpaid moderators who keep Reddit’s subbranches – or subreddits – running, shut down their sections in protest.

Pao wrote that she was leaving Reddit, which attracted more than 163 million visitors last month, because the “board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles”.

Altman’s statement said: “We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to Reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth.

“She brought a face to Reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that.”

Regarding Huffman, the statement said: “We’re very happy to have [him] back. Product and community are the two legs of Reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does.

“He has the added bonus of being a founder with 10 years of Reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of ‘cofounder’.”

Pao was hired by Reddit in April 2013. In November 2014 she was appointed interim chief executive after the resignation of Yishan Wong, who left after an argument with the board over the running of the company.

Pao made international headlines earlier this year when she lost a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit against a former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

She was told to pay legal costs of nearly $1m (£644,000), which her former employer indicated it would waive if she agreed not to appeal the court’s decision. However, it emerged last month that she had decided to go ahead with a legal challenge.

Pao’s case raised issues surrounding gender inequality at elite Silicon Valley technology and venture capital firms. Pao’s lawyers argued she was an accomplished junior partner passed over for promotion because the firm she worked for, Kleiner Perkins, used different standards to judge men and women. Pao claimed she was fired when she complained about discrimination.

During the case lawyers said Pao was subjected to demeaning treatment including being cut out of emails and meetings by a male colleague with whom she broke off an affair and being given a book of erotic poetry by a partner at the company.

Kleiner Perkins’ attorney Lynne Hermle countered during the trial that Pao failed as an investor at the company and sued to get a big payout as she was being shown the door.

Pao lost the case, but it was seen as a watershed moment, as former employees at Twitter and Facebook launched discrimination cases in its wake.

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The online discussion forum said in a blog post that it is ‘unhappy with harassing behavior’ and plans to review individual cases and possibly block users

Reddit: ‘We’ve seen many conversations devolve into attacks against individuals.’ Photograph: Public Domain

Reddit, the online discussion forum known for its free-wheeling ethos, is enacting an anti-harassment policy while still trying to keep its roots as a place for free expression.

Reddit said in a blog post on Thursday that it is “unhappy with harassing behavior” on the site and its survey data shows that users are too. It has been reviewing its community guidelines for the past six months.

“We’ve seen many conversations devolve into attacks against individuals,” the San Francisco company wrote in a blog post, adding that it is also seeing more and different types of harassment than in the past. For example, some users are harassing people across platforms and posting links on Reddit to private information on other sites, it said.

Reddit’s interim CEO is Ellen Pao, who this year lost a high-profile gender-discrimination lawsuit against a prominent venture capital firm. That case highlighted issues of gender imbalance and working conditions for women in Silicon Valley.

Reddit said in its blog post that it defines harassment as “systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone”, making them fear for their safety or conclude that the social-networking and news site is not a safe place to express ideas.

Users being harassed can report the message or post via email. Reddit said it will handle each situation separately, and responses could include banning users.

Earlier this year, Reddit said it would remove photos, videos and links with explicit content if the person in the image hasn’t given permission for it to be posted.

That change came about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites, including Reddit and Twitter.

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Clone site buckling under influx of new users seeking a ‘censorship-free’ experience after Reddit banned five subreddits

Reddit’s Alien logo and CEO Ellen Pao, who has received much abuse from angry Redditors. Photograph: Getty Images

Disgruntled Redditors have decamped en masse to a Swiss-based clone of Reddit called Voat after the site’s administrators banned five subreddits for harassing behaviour.

In response to the deluge, Voat, which mimics Reddit’s design and layout (albeit using “subverses” rather than “subreddits”) was forced to ask for bitcoin donations to keep the site live.

“We are sorry to see Reddit change like this, in this way, in such an accelerated fashion. We would have never anticipated such events,” wrote Atko, Voat’s founder and chief technology officer.

“We are not ready for such a huge influx of new users and haven’t prepared for such a large and sudden increase either.”

The site, which describes itself as “a censorship-free community platform”, has since started asking for bitcoin donations to keep the servers running.

Among the subreddits banned from Reddit were “hamplanethatred” and “fatpeoplehate”, both of which were focussed on harassing and abusing overweight people, and racist forum “shitniggerssay”. Reddit’s admin staff emphasised in a statement that “we’re banning behaviour, not ideas.”

Redditor splattypus summarised the rationale in the Out of the Loop subreddit: “As long as you can keep it 100% confined within the subreddit, anything within legal bounds still goes. As soon as content/discussion/‘politics’ of the subreddit extend out to other users on reddit, communities, or people on other social media platforms with the intent to harass, harangue, hassle, shame, berate, bemoan, or just plain fuck with, that’s when there’s problems. [Fatpeoplehate] et al. was apparently struggling with this part.”

Much of the opprobrium from Reddit users has been focused on the site’s chief executive, Ellen Pao, who took over the top job in November 2014. In March, the site made the first overtures towards cleaning up its notoriously uncontrollable community, adding new rules to its privacy policy preventing the posting of “involuntary pornography”. Now that it’s tightened up its stance on harassment as well, Pao is personally in the firing line. New posts on the front page of Voat include the declaration that “I am friend-zoaning [sic] Reddit, soon to be my ex. Her mother Ellen is a crazy controlling bitch”.

Elsewhere, Reddit has returned to normal. After a day of posts about the multiple bans, the site is now dominated by discussion of Bethesda Softwork’s upcoming post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 4.